The life and work of St. Paul

EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PAUL. 44
the Lord Jesus Himself, had lived and died. He knew that devotion to
God's work involved no protection from earthly miseries and trials, and he
quoted without a murmur the sad words of t bo Psalmist, " For Thy sake are
wo killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep appointed to be slain." 1
But whether it was God's will that he should escape or not, at any rate ifc
would be well to write to the Roman Christians, and answer all objections,
aad remove all doubts respecting the real nature of his teaching, by a
systematic statement of his beliefs as to the true relations between Jews and
Gentiles, between the Law and the Gospel, as viewed in the light of the great
Christian revelation that we are justified through faith in Christ. This, if
anything, might save him from those Judaic counter-efforts on the part of
nominal Christians, which had undone half his work, and threatened to render
of no effect the cross of Christ. He therefore availed himself of the earliest
opportunity to write and to despatch tho greatest of all his Epistles one of
the greatest and deepest and most memorably influential of all compositions
ever written by human pen the Epistla to the Romans.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS, AND THE THEOLOGY OP ST. PAUL.
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JOB xxv. 4 (LXX.).
" But to the cross He nails thy enemies,
The Law that is against thee, and the sins
Of all mankind with Him these are ;
crucified,
Never to hurt them more who rightly trust
In this His satisfaction."
MILTON, Par. lost, xii. 415.
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Apostle had
addressed.
in view, and the conditions cf the ehurch to which it was
Tho first conqueror who had introduced the Jews in any numbers into
Romo was tho great Pompoms, who treated tho nation with extreme indignity/*
In the capital of the world they showed that strong self-reliance by which
they have ever been distinguished. From tho peculiarities of their religious
i Rom. viii. 36.
3 Jos. Antt. xiv. 4, 15; B. J.I. 7; Floras, iii, 5; Tac. H. v. 9; Cic. pro Flaa.
xxvii., &c,